OverviewAbstract: The Center for Research Libraries engages in cooperative collection development with its members and with institutions worldwide. The range of collaborative models includes both centralized and distributed activities, passive acquisition systems (i.e., deposits and ongoing subscriptions), and member-driven collection management. Since 1963, CRL has promoted active subject-based collaboration through its support of the Area Studies Microform Projects.
The Area Studies Microform Projects (AMPs) are a federation of six cooperative programs that seek to identify and preserve materials related to the study of particular world regions. The AMPs provide access to a pool of materials that are beyond the means of any individual area studies program to provide and that might not be available at all without preservation. The projects, in alphabetical order, are:
The AMPs play a vital role in the acquisition and preservation of historic primary and secondary resources. Because most of the projects deal with study areas which were not extensively collected in the U.S. before the late 1950s, much of the material required to support research and teaching in these areas has had to be acquired long after publication. While monographs have more commonly been accessible through the out-of-print market or reprints, materials such as retrospective government publications, serials, and newspapers have been much more difficult to acquire because, in most cases, these are rarely available in long or multiple runs in their original form. More ephemeral material may only have been collected by a handful of scholars, putting these materials effectively out of reach of the scholarly community. It is this void that the AMPs have helped fill over decades of persistent investigation, acquisition, and preservation of research material.
The use of microfilm to capture rare, scattered, or endangered materials gained currency in the 1950s and fueled the growth of library collections by sale of multiple copies of popular materials. In contrast to this standard replication scheme, however, the AMPs engaged in a different model: that of cooperative acquisition and a central, shared collection.
The Center for Research Libraries plays a central role in the projects’ efforts. CRL carries on all administrative functions related to the project such as collecting dues, maintaining financial records, placing orders, processing incoming materials, and handling purchase orders for positive copies. The microforms are stored at and circulated by the Center. Most of the costs for these processes are absorbed by CRL’s general budget.
Each project operates according to its own governance scheme and financial ability. The project membership contributes a nominal fee each year that goes to the preservation of selected material, in addition to certain administrative fees. The affairs of the project are governed by a committee of its members, which consist of institutions interested in the region of focus and are willing to contribute to the goals of the project.
Selection of material is made by the librarians and subject specialists that participate in the program. These specialists investigate possibilities with scholars at their institutions, visitors to their libraries, and through field trips to the region. The combined expertise of the membership helps fuel project ideas and identify additional material. Materials identified as needing preservation are circulated to the membership, which in turn votes on projects and priorities at its annual or semi-annual meetings.
Priorities of selection are based on a number of factors: preservation need of the originals, accessibility of the material (whether held in U.S. libraries in scattered runs or only in the source community), availability of duplicates in member libraries, existence of similar resources elsewhere, cost, and value to present or future scholarship.
CRL places a special emphasis upon the acquisition of materials from other areas of the world. However, each region has its own peculiarities, challenges, and emphases in cooperative preservation and collection building. CRL views the Area Microform Projects, with their specialized knowledge of the field and widespread contacts abroad, as critical resources for driving CRL’s collection building efforts. The following descriptions of the six projects demonstrate the range of activities and the priorities placed on different collection aspects during the founding and development of the projects.
Cooperative Africana Microform Project
Recently marking its fortieth anniversary, the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) has established itself as a critical resource for African studies and a model for subsequent collaborative collection development programs.
Roots of Cooperation
Africana libraries in the United States began discussing cooperative efforts as early as March 1955 at a meeting called by Melville J. Herskovits, founder of the African studies program at Northwestern University and the first (and largest) library devoted to African studies in North America. At this gathering, the assembled librarians and scholars considered strategies for strengthening research libraries in African studies. They decided to establish a professional association dedicated to African studies, with interlibrary cooperation and information sharing among its top priorities. The Library Committee of the newly founded African Studies Association met first in 1958 and established an agenda of goals that included greater acquisition of publications from Africa, preparation of guides to Africa-related archival holdings, and support for national bibliographies in African countries.
In May of 1963, Africana librarians from 12 institutions gathered to discuss the need to preserve African materials not generally available to U.S. institutions. The Center (then the Midwest Inter-Library Center) proposed to host a cooperative endeavor to film a limited number of African periodical titles on a subscription basis. The group formed a consortial agreement, dubbed the Cooperative Africana Microform Project in 1964, to identify African newspapers, serials, and political ephemera and work towards their preservation. The Center’s Board of Directors supported the effort and made provisions to contribute financial assistance, to be matched by participating institutions.
While the program had preservation as its primary focus, it became apparent that widespread access to material was also critical to its success. Thus, the objective of preserving unique titles also incorporated purchase of existing material in microform to make these more widely available to U.S. institutions. At the time, a number of viable organizations, including the Center, were microfilming African newspapers, and CAMP identified microfilm holdings of these periodicals to acquire from such producers as Microfile in South Africa and ACRPP in Paris.
Aside from overseas film purchases, CAMP’s earliest materials were assembled mainly from the collections held in U.S. libraries. These included parliamentary debate papers and journals held by the Library of Congress and personal collections assembled by preeminent Africana scholars. Early collections of this nature include field notes, oral texts, traditional histories, and collections of unpublished and published material issued by various political or social groups. Examples include:
However, it was quickly discovered that other organizations in Europe and Africa were engaged in similar collecting and preservation activities. The British Public Record Office, for example, was organizing and conserving its colonial and foreign office documents relating to its former territorial claims. The Kenya National Archives was preserving its government records in cooperation with Syracuse University. Coordination of information on activities happening worldwide and exploration of collaborative activities became another priority for CAMP.
Exporting Collaboration
In the late 1960s and 1970s, CAMP began working more closely with overseas institutions to identify collections and assist in preserving their material. Because of U.S. interest in southern Africa, CAMP focused heavily on South African institutions and political struggles. CAMP partnered extensively with groups like the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in preserving the material held in their archives. Under this effort valuable collections relating to political parties, labor and student unions, women’s organizations, and the institutional archives of SAIRR itself (documented in two large archival collections of records, press clippings, files, and a microfilm index of the SAIRR library catalog) were preserved. Other institutions, such as the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and University of Ibadan in Nigeria conducted important preservation projects under the CAMP umbrella, and these materials in microform were added to the burgeoning collection at the Center.
During the 1980s, CAMP’s collection grew to include missionary society archive material, newspapers, and journals in many European and African languages, and a wide array of major microform sets (such as “Government publications relating to African countries prior to independence” including annual reports and government gazettes). CAMP’s coffers were sufficiently stocked to acquire and engage in large microfilming activities. Additional projects in the late 1980s that radically extended CAMP’s core offerings included copies of microfilm produced through the “Great Collections” preservation projects at Northwestern University and Michigan State University. These films have increased CAMP’s holdings by over 14,000 monographic titles and more than 1,500 newspapers and serials.
One noteworthy example is the large collection of primary source materials collected by Gwendolen M. Carter and Thomas Karis for their multivolume political history of South Africa, From protest to challenge: A documentary history of African politics in South Africa, 1882-1990 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1972-). A subsequent and equally important collection of ephemera assembled by Karis and Gail M. Gerhart expanded this collection of material to cover the period 1964-1990 (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/CAMP/collections/karisgerhart.htm). However, because of the immense challenges related to establishing strong linkages with institutions across the ocean, the work with archives and institutions in Africa has been slow to develop. Despite the increasing ease of technical outreach, true partnerships cannot prosper without trust, personal commitment, and intensive project management. The African studies library community is small; the needs of African institutions are immense.
Since 1993, CAMP has increasingly worked to expand and strengthen the preservation capabilities of its partners. CAMP has appointed a standing Task Force on Archives to identify opportunities for international projects and potential sources of funding extend its work with African partners. Rapid technological development, growing awareness of preservation needs, and increased professionalism in librarianship in Africa have presented new opportunities for CAMP and its members. Funds provided for cooperative library activities by individual Title VI National Resource Centers have allowed CAMP to launch important preservation efforts in Senegal (see CRL’s Focus article from Autumn 2002, Vol. XXII, No. 1, related to this initiative at http://www.crl.edu/focusarticles/aut02CAMP.htm) and more recently Morocco and Liberia.
CAMP considers its continuing relationship with the National Archives of Senegal a model of international cooperation and points to the latest collection of materials received as proof of its continuing success. So, after its work and building of the past 41 years, within the next decade CAMP should see its labors develop into truly equal partnerships among U.S. and African institutions, formed with the objective of global access to scholarly material emanating from this important region of the world.
For more information on CAMP and its continuing activities, please visit the Area Studies section of CRL’s Web site at http://www.crl.edu/content.asp?l1=3&l2=15&l3=32.
Latin American Microform Project
In 2005, the Latin American Microform Project (LAMP) marked its thirtieth anniversary. Formed by the foremost specialists of Latin America in North American libraries through the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the project was established to promote better access to materials from Latin America that are otherwise unavailable or at risk of being lost to scholars if not preserved. LAMP emphasizes original microfilming of materials and focuses on publications largely inaccessible due to location, environmental conditions, or bibliographic obscurity.
LAMP’s early history has been well documented in Carl W. Deal’s engaging article “The Latin American Microform Project: The First Decade” (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/membershipinfo/lamphis.htm; originally published in Microform Review, vol. 15, no. 1, Winter 1986). In the article, Deal highlights some of the early acquisition projects as well as several important aspects and challenges to cooperative microfilming of Latin American material.
At the time of the article’s publication, LAMP was in a critical point in its development, seeking to expand its membership and ramp up preservation activities on a major scale. From its original constituency of 16 member libraries, LAMP now has 43 members and annual revenues of US$33,000, making it the largest of the microform projects under the Center’s umbrella. Since 1986, LAMP has scaled up its activities, taking on increasingly large and complex projects, some of which are described below.
At the first meeting of LAMP, the project identified both newspapers and government publications among the most desirable items for acquisition. Over the past 30 years, LAMP has stayed the course of its original vision and continues to highlight these resources in its acquisition. As of 2004, LAMP counts among its holdings more than 500 reels (and 360 microfiche) of newspapers representing approximately 300 film years. Its collection of government publications have expanded from its original holdings of Brazilian “Relatórios” (reports of chief administrative officers) to incorporate ministerial reports, presidential messages, official gazettes, statistical bulletins, and important archival holdings.
Of course, the collection extends far beyond these narrow parameters, encompassing literary journals, pamphlet collections and other grey literature, corporate records and institutional archives, and other rich sources for primary research. Given its breadth, the collection can only be covered summarily in a report such as this, and the following will document but a few highlights of the collection and activities of LAMP over the past 30 years.
Memorias
By far the most extensive and ambitious microfilming project done by LAMP to date, the collection of reports from Latin American ministries is one of the crown jewels of the project. Latin America’s government ministries (Ministerios, or sometimes Secretarías; see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/collections/memorias.htm) are the operational organs of the Executive branch, often imbued with substantial authority to promulgate rules and regulations. The official publications of the republics constitute the largest available body of historical documentation about administrative, economic, social, and cultural conditions in these countries. They are a major, if not occasionally the exclusive, source for statistical data from early independence periods.
These materials were found to be a compelling project for major preservation efforts, as the documents themselves were often issued in limited runs on poor-quality paper. In the U.S., the materials were scarcely held and dispersed among many scattered collections, often inaccessible due to poor bibliographic control and “well along the road” to disintegration. In 1985, LAMP applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant to assemble and preserve more than 235 complete or near-complete titles from all Latin American countries. Issues were compiled from the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and additional institutions, and filmed at the Library of Congress. NEH funded the project at a level of US$255,300. The project completed its original term in 1992, though LAMP and the Library of Congress continue to cooperate on filming additional titles of this class.
Theological and Religious Periodicals
As Latin America engaged in social and political transformation in the twentieth century, social and grassroots movements were greatly influenced by the belief systems of the responsible individuals. The journals and bulletins issued by various churches and organizations are an important source of study of how religion affected, and was itself changed by, the social, economic, and political environment in the region. Religious journals had been proposed early in the project’s history, but did not come to the fore until 1991, when Princeton Theological Seminary proposed a project to film approximately 130 religious periodicals (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/collections/princeton.htm) from its collection. The journals are derived from 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and represent a wide range of Christian and ecumenical perspectives.
Human Rights Documentation
LAMP has increasingly become more interested in archives with substantial human rights material. LAMP acquired film of a large set of court documents (processos) from Brazil’s Military Supreme Court. Copied in secrecy, the “Brasil — Nunca Mais” project (see http://catalog.crl.edu/search/o?SEARCH=31811010) documented the cases of more than 7,000 persons arrested, charged, convicted, and/or executed by the court between 1964-1979. In a more recent project, LAMP worked with the Fundación de Protección de la Infancia Dañada por los Estados de Emergencia (PIDEE), a human rights institution in Chile, to organize and preserve case files of children and families affected by the torture and brutal treatment of the Pinochet dictatorship.
International Cooperation
A practice adopted early by LAMP was to cooperate with institutions in Latin America to film materials held in situ. A number of early projects featured filming in countries with archival filming capacity. In many cases, LAMP members or scholars would identify institutions with equipment or filming agents in countries during field visits and negotiate on LAMP’s behalf. Later, archives identified through the Harvard University Program for Latin American Libraries and Archives (PLALA) became prime candidates for follow-on preservation activities.
LAMP entered into a “Convenio” in 1992 with the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico and the Hemeroteca Nacional to exchange film and work jointly on projects. In 1995, the Biblioteca proposed to film ca. 1,500 bound volumes of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, maps, articles, and other documents held in the Colección Lafragua (see http://catalog.crl.edu/search/o?SEARCH=50417895). The Colección is considered unsurpassed for the study of early nineteenth century Mexican intellectual history. The filmed collection contains almost 20,000 items (on 236 reels), though a comprehensive reel index has been unavailable. LAMP is negotiating the full bibliographic description of the set.
LAMP has also periodically worked with the Biblioteca Nacional in Argentina, most recently in 1997, to film holdings of Critica (see http://catalog.crl.edu/search/o?SEARCH=39775790), an influential title from Buenos Aires considered one of the first “modern” Latin American newspapers.
International cooperation has never been a particularly simple process, particularly in areas with scarce resources for preservation or restrictive regimes. As a case in point, LAMP sought to participate with the Instituto de Historia de Cuba to preserve valuable scholarly periodicals. However, due to bureaucratic and administrative challenges, this project achieved only moderate success, producing eight titles from the late nineteenth century on microfiche.
Similarly, LAMP’s long-standing project to film Haitian newspapers at the Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague was challenging and required a high degree of maintenance to stabilize. Conditions in Haiti, as in Cuba, were difficult, especially in the period of government transition in the mid-1980s. The filming agency suffered staffing and power problems, and most notably the destruction of its equipment in riots following the overthrow of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Still, these preservation efforts netted more than 50 titles of early Haiti newspapers (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/collections/haiti.htm) in scattered runs.
Some projects met worse fates, providing LAMP important lessons on the challenges of working in Latin America. In Bolivia, for example, attempts to preserve material in the corporate archives of the Aramayo-Francke mining company (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/collections/aramfran.htm), one of the principal mining ventures of the nineteenth century, met with one setback after another. The preservation staff was robbed at the rail station on arrival. Labor problems resulting from 10 deaths in the mines caused delays in archival access, and power fluctuations caused several burnouts of the film equipment. Finally, suspicions from the local authorities in Tupiza led to the confiscation of the filming equipment and the threat of incarceration of the filmers — effectively terminating the effort. Miraculously, 34 rolls of material were completed and are available for consultation. A copy of the film was delivered to the National Archives in Bolivia.
By far the most successful cooperation with an international partner was with the Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. LAMP’s second major project engaged the Biblioteca to microfilm its holdings (and those of the Arquivo Nacional) of the annual reports (Relatórios) of the presidents of the 20 Brazilian provinces published between 1830 (when the provinces were organized) and 1889 (when they became states of the republic). The Biblioteca made extensive efforts to identify and collect all additional reports it could locate in Brazil, creating a far more robust collection.
So successful was the collaboration, LAMP engaged in several subsequent projects with the Biblioteca Nacional to film the Almanak Laemmert (1844-1889, reporting on the Brazilian Imperial Court), the ministerial reports (Relatórios ministeriais) of the Imperial Period, and provincial presidential reports of the First Republic (1889-1930). Further work, extending the cooperative arrangement through the 1990s, expanded the coverage of ministerial reports through 1960 and added federal presidential reports for the period 1889-1993. The assistance of the staff at the Library of Congress field office in Rio de Janeiro has been invaluable to this effort.
LAMP continues to pursue these types of projects, most recently working with repositories in Brazil and Argentina to film newspapers, journals, and archival collections. The relative strength of preservation capacity in Latin America and increasing contact with archives in the region has allowed for continual new opportunities for the project.
Brazilian Government Document Digitization Project
LAMP was invited to propose a project exploring aspects of digitization from microfilm, and in 1994 the Center was granted US$225,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize its collection of Brazilian government publications. Building on the successful cooperation with the Biblioteca Nacional, LAMP selected these materials because of their scarcity, importance, and volume. Completed in December 2000, the project digitized more than 670,000 page images of government publications, as follows:
Details of this project were presented in past issues of Focus (Spring 2002, see http://www.crl.edu/PDF/302focus.pdf & March 2000, see http://www.crl.edu/PDF/march00.pdf). The detailed final report may be found via the project’s Web site (see http://www.crl.edu/content.asp?l1=4&l2=18&l3=33).
LAMP’s collection is freely available to institutions participating in the project. Other CRL members may benefit through limited borrowing of materials. Items are cataloged in OCLC and available through the Center’s online catalog (at http://www.crl.edu/catalog/index.htm). Any institution may join the project to participate in the selection and preservation of materials and contribute to the strategic direction of the ongoing activities of LAMP. For more information on LAMP, its collections, governance, and news, please visit http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/LAMP/index.htm.
The Middle East Microform Project (MEMP) approaches its twentieth year of preserving and circulating Middle East materials, an achievement worth commemorating. Founded in 1987 by members of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA), the MEMP project was launched with a mission to furnish scholars with “Middle East research materials in microformat which would otherwise be unavailable to them,” including materials that are “inaccessible, in poor condition, or beyond the economic means of an individual institution.”
The geographic scope of the cooperative collection project was defined as the Arab Middle East; Israel for Israeli and Palestinian imprints; Turkey; Iran; Central Asia; and, related areas not covered in other programs. Membership was open to any organization or institution with an interest in supporting the mission.
The program was provided office space in the Center for Research Libraries, which was authorized to administer the program as well. Bylaws were drafted and an Executive Committee was elected to provide governance. As of the first meeting in November 1987, there were 12 institutional members of the project. By November 1988, MEMP membership had grown to 20. In 2006 it stands at 24 members.
The first meetings were particularly significant for the events set in motion that have continued to guide the committee and program to this day. The original goals of the project included collecting newspapers from Arab countries, with the aim of obtaining a wide selection from each country. In addition, the committee agreed to pursue manuscripts, ephemeral collections, and government documents, generally favoring original microfilm over the purchase of existing sets.
Perhaps most notable was the early decision to establish a list of extant Middle Eastern materials in microfilm. Fawzi Khoury and the University of Washington compiled the list, which was released in preliminary form in 1989 as The National Union Catalog of Middle Eastern Microforms. In the following years, the compendium was published, with support from the University of Washington, as The Middle East in Microform. The Union List focused on serials and archival sets, but not monographs.
Initially the Center lacked adequate technical support for Arabic and non-Roman script cataloging. As MEMP places a priority on primary source materials in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, a backlog of uncataloged MEMP material accumulated. To alleviate this bottleneck, the MEMP membership developed a cooperative cataloging program in which project materials were sent to volunteer members for bibliographic description. Once returned, the Center edited the information to conform to local and national standards then loaded it along with national bibliographic utilities into its catalog. MEMP continues to participate in cooperative cataloging as new materials are received.
Continuing Activity
Today, MEMP continues on the successful course set by its founders nearly 20 years ago. In addition to the array of newspapers from Algeria, Sudan, Turkey, Lebanon, and other Middle Eastern countries, MEMP films and circulates a variety of ephemeral materials, including significant Arabic pamphlets from the Library of Congress collection. The collection, dating to the 1940s and 1950s, also contains press extracts and digests from various press services and U.S. and U.K. embassies.
A few of the highlights from MEMP’s collection include:
Ahali Group Newspapers (1932-1963): The Ahali group newspapers represent the ideas, philosophy, and political activities of first, the Ahali group, and later the National Democratic Party of Iraq.
Aljadid (1993-2002) — A monthly “record of Arab culture and arts” produced by the Nagam Cultural Project.
Chaquèri Collection of Iranian Left-Wing Materials (1960-85) — A collection of 1,100 pamphlets, serials, and political ephemera by or relating to activist groups opposing the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
MEMP continues to publicize and enhance access to its microfilm collection and publishes for its members an annual holdings list of project materials. Additional information on MEMP membership, meetings, recent projects, and more is available on the program’s MEMP Web site at http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/MEMP/index.htm. The Web site includes an online proposal submission form that enables members, scholars, and other interested individuals to suggest new projects.
Strategies and Directions
Along with its kindred microform projects at CRL, MEMP remains a model of cooperative collection development and inter-institutional action not replicated among many fields of U.S. scholarship nor among most academic research institutions in the rest of the world. Even so, to maintain and develop its standing in the field of Middle Eastern studies, MEMP is committed to a methodical examination of its successes and challenges, strengths and weaknesses, to help identify new strategies and directions for future activity. As an aid, the following section of the discussion paper will look at existing policies, raise questions, and suggest potential avenues of pursuit for MEMP in the ever-changing landscape of information management.
MEMP as Coordinator
MEMP is in a key position among libraries specializing in Middle Eastern studies. As one of few cooperative activities in this field, it has the potential to assume an even greater role in enabling concerted preservation action among its members, and between its members and outside organizations, associations, and research institutions. While MELA may be the most appropriate venue for cooperation among its members and Middle East libraries in the acquisition of materials and the development of bibliographic control, MEMP’s mission and infrastructure make it well suited to foster coordinated preservation activities among Middle East collections. To this aim, MEMP is undertaking the following activities:
MEMP as Disseminator
Just as MEMP would benefit from increased coordination among institutions, it would similarly profit from increased communication and dissemination of information. In an effort to further promote its resources as well as broader issues of preservation and access, MEMP is:
Project Development
Historically, most of MEMP’s collections have been drawn from resources held in U.S. institutions. Recently MEMP began to explore cooperative projects with outside institutions, such as the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. There is a great body of original and critically valuable material available in other regions of the world. In addition, conditions outside Europe and the U.S., both in terms of climate and storage facilities, are not particularly conducive to preservation. However, production of microfilm in the Middle East is often well below national quality standards required for U.S. collecting. Thus, MEMP is discussing strategies to:
Naturally, such deliberations raise issues of what type of project MEMP should be, and the role of a cooperative microform project in an increasingly digital age. However, while the appropriate media for preserving and accessing resources may change, the committee is resolute in its adherence to the general principles set for the program almost 20 years ago.
Slavic and East European Microform Project
The Slavic and East European Microform Project (SEEMP) is the “youngest” of the AMPs, having been formed in 1996. The need for a Slavic and East European project was discussed in a number of venues in prior years. However, it was not until 1995 that a Steering Committee was formed to serve as a forum for discussion on the need for preservation activities in Slavic and East European Studies and how these needs might be met by the formation of a microform project. Would such a cooperative project be advantageous? What should be its focus? Which institutions, if any, are willing to commit to such a project? What kind of structure would work best?
The Steering Committee members were from institutions that belonged to one or more of the existing projects at CRL and were already familiar with the basic concepts and operations. However, unlike the other AMPs that were formed through independent entities that chose to align with the Center, this project turned to CRL to assist in the formation and development from the outset. CRL’s staff assisted in advising the committee, including assistance in the development of the draft bylaws, based on earlier proposed versions and examples from the other AMPs.
As discussions progressed, agreement on basic purposes and structures emerged. The general mission statement was developed as follows: “the purpose of the Slavic and East European Microform Project (SEEMP) is to acquire microform copies of unique, scarce, rare and/or unusually bulky and expensive research material pertaining to the field of Slavic and East European studies; and to preserve deteriorating printed and manuscript materials of scholarly value.”
Defining the region of focus was a surprisingly challenging task, as the region continued to define itself through the mid-1990s and the post-communist era. The committee decided to be as inclusive as possible, and included the countries of Eastern and Central Europe (Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Bosnia & Hercegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia & Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine), Russia, the Transcaucasian countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), and the Central Asian countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).
The Steering Committee issued a formal invitation to membership in January 1996, asking institutions for a commitment to join by April 1, 1996. Invoices went out at the beginning of CRL’s fiscal year, July 1. Initial membership fees to join were set (and remain to date) at US$600.
The structure of SEEMP membership was similar to that of the other AMPs, organized on the principle of institutional membership with a committee of the whole and an executive committee to carry out project business between annual meetings. Member institutions are entitled to vote on all questions before the committee; borrow all project materials; purchase positive copies of SEEMP-funded negative microforms at member prices; and, propose suitable titles for original filming or purchase from commercial sources.
The first meeting of SEEMP took place at the 1996 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston on November 17, 1996. At the meeting, the committee discussed the kinds of proposals that would be of value to the group, the merits of original filming versus purchasing existing sets, and collaborating with commercial filmers to produce new sets from materials held in the region. A number of ideas surfaced that later became full projects of the group. These projects included:
These projects, among others, represent the variety and scope of the efforts SEEMP sought to undertake.
The committee over time has focused a good deal attention on acquiring and filming regional newspapers, both contemporary and historical material. Over a series of proposals, SEEMP engaged East View Information Services to acquire permission, collect, and preserve more than 20 regional newspapers covering the period 1991 to the present. These regional newspapers are not commonly collected nor commercially microfilmed elsewhere, but represent important local perspectives on national affairs as well as news of local events largely absent in national press in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The titles cover cities and districts (oblasts) from all over Russia, including the Far East, Caucasus and Caspian Sea regions, and the Urals.
In a related project, SEEMP has filmed a wide array of titles that represent right-wing extremist views in Russian politics and society. The papers, covering roughly the years 1990-1999, were collected by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, among others. The papers represent a variety of views from the well-known LDPR of Vladimir Zhirinovskii to lesser known groups, all of whom present views out of the mainstream of Russian politics. Russian nationalist organs in the Baltic countries, Belarus, and Ukraine are included along with newspapers from many regions in the Russian Federation. The newspapers represent monarchist, nationalist, fascist, and conservative Orthodox sentiments. Many also represent a strong anti-Semitic undercurrent in Russian politics and society.
Only a decade old, SEEMP has amassed an impressive collection of materials for consultation. SEEMP is considering how to expand its activities to the other broad regions, including South Slavic regions and Central Asia. SEEMP is also considering how to incorporate digital projects into its workflow. From the outset, SEEMP agreed that digital projects could be included as part of its activities. This principle was included in the founding documents and in the guide to submitting proposals, available on the project’s Web site (at http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/SEEMP/index.htm).
The South Asia Microform Project (SAMP) is an indispensable tool for South Asian scholarship. As a framework for cooperative collecting and preservation and a scholarly resource of unique higher education materials, SAMP exemplifies the benefits of cooperative activity. The collection, spanning four centuries and covering the entire subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh), is a treasure for scholars in all disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.
A useful sketch of SAMP’s early history (see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/SAMP/membershipinfo/samphis.htm) was undertaken in 1988 by Jack C. Wells, then South Asian bibliographer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In it, he relates the founding of the project in 1967 by 22 participating libraries. At the core of the project was the mission to cooperatively acquire and maintain a readily accessible collection of unique materials in microform related to the study of South Asia. Materials are collected both through the filming efforts of the project and through the purchase of positive copies of materials filmed by other groups, institutions and companies.
Since 1988, SAMP has scaled up its collecting efforts through the preservation of major archives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Education, the U.S.-India Fund for Cultural, Educational, and Scientific Cooperation, and the Government of India have assisted SAMP in its efforts to provide access to a vast array of social, cultural, scientific, and political materials. SAMP’s catalog currently lists over 27,600 records (though this number would likely double should one take into account the as yet unanalyzed sets of fiche and microfilm available).
Some of the major collections assembled in the 1990s include over 4,000 Hindustani titles from the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC) from the nineteenth century, covering a range of subjects including arts and sciences, history, literature and religion. This collection complements a previous effort to preserve over 2,000 unique Hindi texts from the OIOC for the same period and subject themes.
One of the most valued assets in SAMP’s collection is the nearly 24,000 titles filmed so far under the “Microfilming of Indian Publications Project (MIPP).” This effort seeks to preserve and make accessible all books listed in The National Bibliography of Indian Literature: 1901-1953 (see http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/nbil.py), a compilation of 56,000 books in the 16 languages of India. The collection documents the development of the cultural milieu of the struggle for independence from colonial rule and exemplifies the flourishing of scholarly publishing in the subcontinent.
Historians of the colonial era will find a wealth of resources relating to the India Office and East India Company, chief among them the “India Office Records, Home Miscellaneous Series, 1631-1859.” This set comprises most of the important surviving documents relating to the London administration of India and Myanmar before independence. The entire contents of the Home Miscellaneous Series (IOR/H) can be searched in the Access 2 Archives database (see http://www.a2a.org.uk/).
Additional sources from this period include records from the East India Company, India Office Lists, 1876-1947 (a registry of service records for higher ranking civil servants), and the large collection of official publications (acts and regulations, legislative debates and official gazettes of the central and provincial governments of British India) contained in the IDC fiche sets, “Selections from the records of the Government of India.” SAMP also possesses a number of missionary society archives from this period.
As India and other provinces moved toward independence, nationalist sentiment and the emergence of provincial governments and a federal legislature are documented in such collections as the legislative assembly debates and proceedings for central and provincial councils in India, East Bengal (Pakistan), Ceylon, and other regions. Additional confrontation may be evidenced in such collections as SAMP’s Indian Proscribed Tracts (material censored by the British either for its criticism of the regime and calls for self-government or for its expressions of communal conflict; see http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/SAMP/collections/indpro.htm) and the “Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929-32,” in which 31 leaders of organized labor and Communist party members were arrested for sedition — regarded as the largest political trial ever held in India.
Complementing all of these resources is SAMP’s collection of 100-plus newspapers from the region, focusing mainly on the late nineteenth- through the twentieth century timeframe. Significant titles include Amrita Bazar Patrika (1905-1951, supplementing CRL holdings of 1962-current); Behar Herald (1913-1961); Bombay Chronicle (1913-1950); Delhi Gazette (1837-1889); Madras Mail (1868-1889); The Tribune (Lahore, Pakistan, 1881-1961); and many others. SAMP continues to engage in the acquisition of newspapers and is actively pursuing vernacular language titles.
SAMP’s collection has been characterized generally as covering “pre-independence India with less attention being paid to Nepal and Sri Lanka, and to the subcontinent after 1947.” This description remains generally true: approximately 85 percent of imprints are from or related to India. However, in recent years SAMP has increased its emphasis on the other regions and languages of the subcontinent.
As an example, SAMP is collaborating with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (http://www.cssscal.org/) to create use copies of microfilm for Bengali literary and historical journals. The Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection contains some of the most important holdings of nineteenth century Bengali periodicals, monographs, and reports, filmed from the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat and other collections. By creating surrogates of the 576 reels produced by the CSSSC, SAMP is ensuring that the originals and the master negatives will be secured for future scholarship.
In another project, SAMP recently supported the efforts of the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (http://www.mpp.org.np/), the principal archive of books and periodicals in the Nepali language, to preserve its extensive collection of newspapers. The titles preserved in Kathmandu (and duplicated through CRL’s partners in Chennai) span the entire twentieth century and represent a wide spectrum of opinions.
In one of the most compelling examples, SAMP provided physical and financial support to aid the work of scholars identifying collections abroad. While in the field searching for obscure texts relevant to her research, Professor Rebecca Manring (Indiana University) stumbled upon a neglected private manuscript collection in West Bengal. The collection belonged to the late Sukumar Sen, one of the leading scholars of Bengali vernacular literature as well as a gifted linguist and prolific writer. Dr. Manring began cataloging the material and sought SAMP funding to preserve the collection. Dr. Manring spent several months in India, cataloging and preparing the materials, dusting the manuscripts, assisting the filmers who used SAMP’s portable microfilm camera, and repackaging the materials for safe storage. Her close connection with the Sen family, established credentials in India, and respect for the wishes of the family all contributed to the realization of the project. A printed index to the collection is forthcoming.
The extensive set of microfiche acquired in cooperation with the Library of Congress Field Office in New Delhi comprises a significant part of SAMP’s contemporary collection. SAMP and the Center for Research Libraries have been collaborating since 1985 in the acquisition of this material, numbering hundreds of thousands of fiche. As this material was selected for microfiche because of its fragile, voluminous, or dispersed nature, it covers every country in the region with a wide variety of topics (sciences, social sciences, and the humanities) and date ranges. Increasingly, material such as pamphlet collections are being arranged topically (“Islam in Pakistan,” “Ecology and environment in India”). The Center is engaged in retrospective cataloging of this material to improve access.
While the resources described above primarily support historical or socio-political research, there is a wide variety of other material, including agricultural and scientific documents, philosophical and legal journals, and a broad selection of literature and literary studies. Of note is the extensive collection of “Popular literature in Hindi and Urdu” from the collection of Dr. Frances Pritchett (Columbia University). This fiche set is comprised of qissah (narrative “chapbook” literature), nautanki (folk-opera) texts, and other popular genres.
Southeast Asia Microform Project
Throughout the 1960s the challenges to acquiring scholarly materials from Southeast Asia were acute. Unstable political climates, inflation, and conflict in the region all made it difficult to identify and preserve historical materials and records from nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and others. Government documents proved exceedingly difficult to acquire, as most agencies refused to allow their publications to be sent out of country.
During this period, the strongest representation of material collected was from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. The advent of the Public Law 480 program for Indonesia in 1964 subsidized the acquisition of monographs, serials, and newspapers by North American institutions. A similar program for Myanmar, however, met with less success. Materials from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (then in the midst of military conflict) remained virtually inaccessible.
Collaborative Networks
It was in this climate that research libraries sought collective solutions to the challenges of acquiring and cataloging Southeast Asian material. Early cooperation among universities (particularly Cornell and Yale) gave rise to microfilm projects producing copies of newspapers, theses, and out-of-print materials. With the growing availability of these resources, institutions began to express interest in an inter-institutional repository for Southeast Asian microfilms, where management and distribution of these resources could be centrally undertaken.
January 1969 proved an auspicious month for Southeast Asia librarianship. At a conference on Southeast Asia documentation in Chicago, librarians met to discuss a proposal to establish a “Southeast Asia Microforms” (SEAM) partnership. Organized by Professor Fred Riggs (University of Hawaii), the conference was attended by scholars, librarians, government officials, and other interested individuals. At the meeting, the basic principles for establishing a cooperative arrangement were put in place and a subcommittee was established to craft a statement of need and a development plan.
SEAM Foundation and Development
From the outset the SEAM committee envisioned the project as an international collaborative network, even though preceding models, such as CAMP and SAMP, were geared primarily towards North American participation. Instead, SEAM aimed to create a project that featured participation and ownership from institutions within Southeast Asia, North America, and other regions. Ultimately, the concerns of the overseas partners and the practicality of sharing a collection across such distances weighed against a true global partnership, and an alternate strategy — to constitute SEAM as a partnership of institutions external to Southeast Asia — was put in place.
A prospectus for the organization of the Southeast Asian Microform Project was forwarded to interested institutions in February 1970, and by the first organizational meeting on April 5, 1970 in San Francisco, 21 North American members had joined the project.
From the beginning, the Center for Research Libraries would play a paramount role in the success of the project, not only due to its experience in administering similar projects but also for its ability to lend materials to a wide array of participating libraries and to sell copies of materials for which it owned the negatives. Hence the Center was established as the legal entity under which SEAM would operate, though the project was constituted as a joint project with the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA), which would hold continuing and supportive interest in the project. Representatives of both CRL and CORMOSEA serve ex officio on the executive committee of SEAM. Gordon Williams, the first director of the Center, played a leading and decisive role in establishing SEAM and in the activities of the first several years.
The SEAM partnership was created out of the same concerns and held the same shared principles as the CAMP and SAMP programs:
SEAM also saw value in providing wider access to previously filmed material, and a distinction was made between original filming projects and materials to be purchased from other sources. The SEAM/North American Pool (SEAM/NAP) was initiated to separately “pool” the funds of participating institutions to acquire extant microfilm — an admirable cooperative effort in its own right — as well as an economical way to quickly stock SEAM’s shelves with available material. SEAM/NAP activities got underway prior to those of SEAM itself, with its formal launch in April 1970.
Acquisition Activities
Under the chairmanship of Peter Ananda (University of California, Berkeley) SEAM/NAP acquired its first materials from the British Public Record Office (PRO). These included India Office Records for Burma (administrative reports, Legislative Council debates, proceedings) and Straits Settlement reports (records, Legislative Council proceedings). SEAM/NAP also devoted portions of its budget to acquiring newspapers such as the Straits Times (1936-1942).
After a rather slow start, the activities of SEAM proper (that is, the portion of SEAM devoted to original microfilming) started generating results in 1973 with the acquisition of the Deli Courant (1885-1940), an important early colonial newspaper (filmed from the holdings at the Koninklijke Bibliothek in the Netherlands). SEAM also commissioned original filming from the PRO to preserve various Sessional Papers (Borneo, Brunei, Kelantan, Malay States, Malacca, Singapore, and Trengganu) from the Colonial Office records. A third item was the Burma Gazette (1875-1927), the official publication of colonial Myanmar. This major undertaking took several years to accomplish and filled more than 300 reels of film.
Program Consolidation
Because of the challenges of locating available material for filming and of securing the acquisition of negatives for reproduction purposes — many institutions, particularly in Europe, insisted on the retention of negatives due to archival or depository policies — SEAM continued to face difficulties in completing projects on a timely basis. Added to the challenges were the rising costs of producing original film and the complex administrative challenge of running what were essentially two separate programs under the same banner. As a result, in March 1978, the activities of SEAM and SEAM/NAP were merged. The belief was that integration would allow more flexible and effective acquisition of Southeast Asian materials. The merger was sealed with the issuance of a revised Prospectus in July 1978.
Expansion and Diversification
In 1980, a decade into the project, SEAM listed more than 90 individual titles or collections in its catalog, consisting of nearly 2,200 reels of film and several thousand microfiche. As the project moved forward, the committee turned its attention to expanding its breadth of offerings. Early decisions were weighted heavily towards Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Straits area. Efforts were made to acquire materials from the Philippines (including, for example, Rosenstock’s Manila City Directory, the influential Chinese-language daily Chinese Commercial News, 1948-1972, and an extensive set of nineteenth century Philippines lexicons and dictionaries); Vietnam (newspapers and serials such as Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue, Phu-Nu Tan Van, and La Tribune indochinoise); Thailand (Statistical Yearbook, Thailand and extremely rare serials and monographs from the Gedney collection at the University of Michigan); and Cambodia (the newspaper Kambuja Suriya and the Bulletin Officiel du Cambodge, 1965-1973).
The 1980s were particularly productive years for the project, especially in locating and filming important materials in archives in Southeast Asia. In 1983, Alan Feinstein, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, proposed the microfilming of early Javanese newspapers and periodicals held in the Museum Pusat in Jakarta. The museum was considered a “rich and virtually untouched treasure trove for Javanese court literature,” and the proposed materials, including the newspapers Bramartani and Jurumartani, represented the first vernacular newspapers in Indonesia. In cooperation with the National Library, SEAM successfully arranged for filming of dozens of titles with on-site assistance by Feinstein.
While undertaking this work, Feinstein was able to develop contacts with other institutions that led to a number of large-scale projects. Undertaken by several Australian universities with the support of the Ford Foundation, a project was established to film the extensive manuscript collection held in the kraton (palace) libraries of the Sultan of Yogyakarta. The approximately 450 manuscripts from the Widaya Budaya collection include court annals as well as works of general interest such as literature, history, genealogy, religion, and arts. With a few exceptions, most notably a Koran from 1797, these manuscripts were copied in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The estimated 250 Krida Mardawa manuscripts are on dance, music, and wayang (wong and gedhog). SEAM was designated the U.S. depository of all filmed material.
Expanding the Partnership
Encouraged in part by these activities and fueled by the desire to undertake larger projects that member fees could not support, SEAM engaged in strategic planning to identify potential activities and to seek funding support for more extensive efforts. Several foundations had developed interest in Southeast Asian studies and regional preservation programs, and SEAM built fruitful relationships with these, most notably the Henry Luce and Ford Foundations. Alan Feinstein, by now serving as program officer in the Ford Foundation’s Southeast Asia regional office, had identified several undertakings for preservation work and was seeking participant support to launch them. For this effort and for several subsequent projects in Indonesia, SEAM would contribute raw film stock to the institutions preserving their material in exchange for a positive copy of the materials produced. Over the next several years, SEAM contributed to Luce projects and received film for such valuable collections as:
Special mention should be given to the Library of Congress field office in Jakarta for its assistance in facilitating these projects. Without LC staff on the ground in the region, SEAM would have been hard pressed to achieve its work there. The field office provided logistical support, professional expertise, technical equipment, training, camera time, shipping assistance, and many other critical functions — most importantly, perhaps, maintaining good relations and frequent communication with the regional partners. The Library of Congress also played a strong role in organizing another project with the National Library entitled the “Colloquial Malay” serial project, first proposed by Dr. Ellen Rafferty. The project objective was to preserve the most important newspapers and journals in Bahasa Melayu, the regional dialect of the archipelago used as the lingua franca to transact business among diverse cultures.
The Henry Luce Foundation was another institution that strongly supported SEAM efforts in Southeast Asia. Beginning in 1989, Luce included a provision in its Southeast Asia grant guidelines that any preservation project funded should provide a positive copy of microfilm produced to SEAM. Because of this action by Luce, SEAM was the beneficiary of hundreds of reels from large preservation projects, establishing a tremendous corpus of scholarly material at SEAM. This material included:
Activities in Indonesia and the Luce-sponsored projects occupied much of SEAM’s time, and resources, into the mid-1990s. SEAM also developed a major collaborative project sponsored by the Luce Foundation and the Harvard-Yenching Institute to preserve materials held in the National Library of Vietnam. The objective of the proposal was to film early newspapers published in the Romanized vernacular quoc ngu script, with a focus on those titles not held in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. The project also aspired to film materials generated by the revolutionary authorities in the Resistance Zones outside of French-controlled areas during the Indochina War of 1946–1954, and some manuscripts held in small museums and private collections.
Preserving the Past, Investing in the Future
From the late 1990s to the present, SEAM has continued its course of identifying materials in need, both within collections in the U.S. as well as in the region. SEAM has provided substantial funding to Cornell University to support preservation of their extensive newspaper collections (to date, SEAM has supported the filming of nearly 175 titles in long or short runs for the period 1950-1990, including a long run of the Vietnam Press). SEAM has also collaborated to support preservation of major archives such as the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s collection of Khmer Rouge documents. SEAM has increasingly focused more on contemporary materials, such as human rights documentation, election returns, and political ephemera. The project has also begun to focus attention on the creation of digital resources, particularly for materials that prove easier to use in electronic format (SEAM has, for example, sponsored the encoding of Philippine election returns at the Institute for Public Policy in Manila).
Preservation of critical resources in Southeast Asia is again becoming an international cooperative effort. In 2000, a full 30 years after the first proposal discussion of SEAM at Puntjak Pass, a group of preservationists, academicians, and government officials from the various countries in Southeast Asia met in Chiang Mai to form a consortium to improve the infrastructure for preservation efforts within the Southeast Asian region. The Southeast Asian Consortium for Access and Preservation (SEACAP, see http://www.seacap.chiangmai.ac.th/) issued a declaration on its mission statement, objectives, and short-, medium-, and long-term action agenda, and one of the first efforts undertaken was to establish an online Masterlist of Southeast Asia Microfilms, featuring more than 15,000 records from 37 institutions.
Over the past 35 years, the Southeast Asia Microform Project has played a critical role in preserving important research material from Southeast Asia. As institutions in Southeast Asia continue to develop capabilities to ensure the survival of their cultural property, SEAM will be presented with new opportunities to collaborate with colleagues to identify, preserve, and provide access to these resources. For more information on SEAM, please visit http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/SEAM/index.htm.
The AMPs have served a dual agenda of preservation and access for four decades, and the results can be found in the rich and broad collections held by the Center for Research Libraries and available to North American scholars. Their success is attributable not only to the pooling of funds, but to the pooling of the expertise that exists among the bibliographers and scholars participating in the program.
However, the groups are facing new collection challenges in the modern era. While international collecting has traditionally focused on areas deemed “of greatest importance,” these targets are shifting in an era of increasing globalization and internationalization of scholarly disciplines. The cross-border flow of people and information today has rendered a strictly region-based model for preserving cultural and historical materials obsolete.
The “digital revolution” has made materials available that are impossible to collect in print (or microfilm). However, with new tools that provide unprecedented access, it is imperative for institutions to think more responsibly about ownership, copyright, and access to information. It is critical to engage in new models of partnership with source communities rather than “extractive” methods of collecting. Projects should provide a return to those communities and focus on mutual benefits and gains.
The Center for Research Libraries is working with the AMPs to ensure these goals are met. CRL is beginning to plan its transition to digital capture, augmenting (and eventually replacing) microform with digital media in its reformatting of traditional source materials. The organization will provide support and incentives for the Area Microform Projects and other preservation efforts to adopt digital capture.
James Simon is Director of International Resources at the Center for Research Libraries.
E–mail: simon [at] crl [dot] edu
© 2007 James Simon